by Paul Gilster | Apr 16, 2014 | Astrobiology and SETI |
How do you produce life on an early Earth bathed in ultraviolet radiation? The presumption when I was growing up was that the combination of chemicals in ancient ponds, fed energy by lightning or ultraviolet light itself, would produce everything needed to start the process. Thus Stanley Miller and Harold Urey’s experiments, beginning in 1953 at the University of Chicago, which simulated early Earth conditions to produce amino acids out of a sealed ‘atmosphere’ of water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen, with electrodes firing sparks to simulate lightning.
But there are other ways of explaining life’s origins, as a new study from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Icy Worlds Team at the NASA Astrobiology Institute reminds us. Hydrothermal vents on the sea floor have been under consideration since the 1980s, with some researchers pointing to the ‘black smokers’ that produce hot, acidic fluids. The new NASA work looks at much cooler vents bubbling with alkaline solutions like those in the ‘Lost City,’ a field of hydrothermal activity in the mid-Atlantic on the seafloor mountain Atlantis Massif.
Image: This image from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean shows a collection of limestone towers known as the “Lost City.” Alkaline hydrothermal vents of this type are suggested to be the birthplace of the first living organisms on the ancient Earth. Credit: JPL.
Here there is a field of about thirty large calcium carbonate chimneys — some 30 to 60 meters tall — and a number of smaller structures venting mainly hydrogen and methane into the surrounding water. The so-called ‘water world’ theory that JPL’s Michael Russell has been working on since 1989 draws on the idea that warm alkaline vents like these would have maintained a state of imbalance with ancient oceans that were acidic. Life is, in this formulation, seen as the inevitable outcome of disequilibrium, producing enough energy to drive its formation.
Thus we have a proton gradient with hydrogen ions concentrated largely on the outside of the vent’s chimneys, which the work refers to as ‘mineral membranes.’ We also have an electrical gradient between oceans rich with carbon dioxide. and hydrogen and methane from the vents as they meet at the chimney wall. The transference of electrons could have produced complex organic compounds, using processes not so different from those that occur in mitochondria.
“Within these vents, we have a geological system that already does one aspect of what life does,” said Laurie Barge, second author of the study at JPL. “Life lives off proton gradients and the transfer of electrons.”
The work represents a fundamental shift in focus over older ‘chemical soup’ models, its examination of membrane-spanning gradients pre-empting prebiotic chemistry. The paper explains:
…there is an advantage to be gained from examining the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry from the bottom up, that is, to “look under the hood” at life’s first free energy-converting nanoengines or “mechanocatalysts.” Such an approach encourages us to see life as one of the last in a vast hierarchical cascade of emergent, disequilibria-converting entropy-generating engines in the Universe. In doing so, we keep our sights on the “astro” in astrobiology.
The researchers speculate that minerals may have played the role of enzymes in the ancient ocean, interacting with local chemicals and driving reactions. A mineral called ‘green rust’ (fougèrite) could use the proton gradient to produce phosphate-laden molecules capable of storing energy. Molybdenum is also in play, a rare metal that can drive important chemical reactions. Thus basic metabolic reactions around sea floor hot springs may help to explain not only how life emerged on our own planet but also how it may emerge on worlds far beyond.
On this latter point, the paper explains how to proceed:
In considering habitability and the potential for life elsewhere in the Solar System and beyond, the physical and chemical disequilibria that obtain on wet icy rocky worlds, and the various processes that might relieve them, need to be established. If life’s origin is ultimately coupled to geophysical convection in a particular geochemical context, one should be able to make predictions about life’s likelihood on a planet or moon of interest from application of coupled chemical and fluid/geodynamical modeling, and from the availability of key feedstocks, thus accounting for other planetary energetic drivers, for example, tidal and radiogenic heating, solar wind interactions, magnetic dynamos—appropriate to the object in question.
We’d like to account, in other words, for the disequilibrium-producing factors that could play an astrobiological role on multitudes of exoplanets. The possibilities range widely, from gravitational effects to thermal and chemical gradients that can all play a role in life’s inception. Particularly close to home, of course, we focus in on places like Enceladus and Europa, where we have nearby laboratories for observing these processes in action. Until we can put the right kind of instrumentation on the scene, continuing Earth-bound lab work on these ideas is the way forward.
The paper is Russell et al., “The Drive to Life on Wet and Icy Worlds,” Astrobiology Vol. 14, Issue 4 (April 15, 2014). Available online. A JPL news release is also available.
by Paul Gilster | Apr 15, 2014 | Outer Solar System |
After yesterday’s look back at the ambitious Project Orion planners and their hopes of reaching Saturn’s moons by the 1970s, let’s stay in the same vicinity today to look at what may be the emergence of an entirely new moon. As always, we have Cassini to thank for this work, which shows a disturbance at the outer edge of Saturn’s A ring. This is the outermost of the large, bright rings, with a width of approximately 14,600 kilometers. Its inner boundary is the Cassini division, a 4800 kilometer wide region between it and the B ring.
The image below shows the disturbance, an area in the shape of an arc that is about 20 percent brighter than its surroundings. The region is some 1200 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide, and it is accompanied by breaks in the otherwise smooth profile at the edge of the ring. The current thinking is that both the arc and the protuberances are the result of gravitational effects caused by a nearby object. Are the rings, then, giving birth to a new moon?
Image: The disturbance visible at the outer edge of Saturn’s A ring in this image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft could be caused by an object replaying the birth process of icy moons. This view looks toward the illuminated side of the rings from about 53 degrees above the plane of the rings. It was obtained from a distance of approximately 775,000 miles (1.2 kilometers) from Saturn, with a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 31 degrees. The scale is about 7 kilometers per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.
Informally dubbed ‘Peggy,’ the proto-moon, assuming that is what it is, cannot yet be resolved in Cassini’s imagery, although the spacecraft will move closer to the outer edge of the A ring in late 2016, perhaps offering an opportunity to study it in greater detail. Scientists estimate it to be no more than a kilometer in diameter, but the diminutive object could give us the chance to shake out a recent proposal that all the icy moons formed originally from ring particles before moving further away from the planet, growing over time as they merged with other moons.
“The theory holds that Saturn long ago had a much more massive ring system capable of giving birth to larger moons,” said Carl Murray (Queen Mary University, London), lead author of the paper on this work. “As the moons formed near the edge, they depleted the rings and evolved, so the ones that formed earliest are the largest and the farthest out.”
Many of Saturn’s moons are composed largely of ice, and they do indeed increase in size with distance from the planet. “We may,” adds Murray, “be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right.”
This news combined with the thought of using Enceladus to refuel a Project Orion vessel, as we discussed yesterday, somehow calls to mind Isaac Asimov’s story “The Martian Way,” a novella first published in Galaxy Science Fiction (1952) and later made available in The Martian Way and Other Stories (1955). Martian colonists make the trip to Saturn to bring back a cubic mile of ice that will supply the colony for 200 years. They, embed their ships in the ice block for the return even as they use its resources as reaction mass.
Martians, it turns out, are the perfect crew for deep space vehicles because — Gerald Driggers, author of the Earth-Mars Chronicles, will like this — they’ve been forced to acclimatize to cramped conditions and the rigors of space travel. Asimov’s characters look down upon the unfortunate planet-bound population of Earth and discuss what they see as an inevitable future:
“Even if they come to Mars, it will only be their children that are free. There’ll be starships someday: great huge things that can carry thousands of people and maintain [their] self-contained equilibrium for decades, maybe centuries. Mankind will spread through the whole Galaxy. But people will have to live their lives out on shipboard until new methods of interstellar travel are developed, so it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who will colonize the Universe. That’s inevitable. It’s got to be. It’s the Martian way.”
The new work on the A-ring anomaly is Murray et al, “The discovery and dynamical evolution of an object at the outer edge of Saturn’s A ring,” published online by Icarus, 28 March 2014 (abstract).
by Paul Gilster | Apr 14, 2014 | Advanced Rocketry |
One day in the late summer of 1958, at a time when the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was still in the hands of the U.S. Army (the transfer to NASA wouldn’t happen until the end of that year), Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor showed up at the facility outside Pasadena. Try to imagine the scene: At the time, JPL was busy building the Explorer 6 satellite, all 65 kilograms of it. And here came two Project Orion scientists talking about not just satellites but auxiliary vehicles, additional payload to fly aboard their proposed 4000 ton spacecraft that they hoped would explore the outer planets.
“The reception there was rather cool,” Dyson would later say. “The lady at the front office decided Taylor and I were a pair of crackpots and tried to get rid of us. After about half an hour of arguing we got inside and then it all went very well.”
Image: Freeman Dyson, whose payload ideas must have confounded the team working on early Earth satellites. Credit: Courtesy of Princeton University Archives. Princeton University Library.
The entertaining tale is told in George Dyson’s Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (Henry Holt, 2002), and it’s easy to see why even hardened rocket scientists would be confounded by what the duo proposed. By mid-1958, the largest payload ever lifted into orbit was Sputnik III, weighing in at 1325 kilograms. Project Orion was intended to loft 1600 tons to low-Earth orbit, or in its advanced version, 1300 tons to a landing on one of Saturn’s moons. The moon that most drew Dyson’s eye in 1958 was tiny Enceladus.
When I wrote about this in connection with the recent findings of an ocean within the distant moon, I was delighted to receive the diagram below from George Dyson, which shows the numbers as tabulated by Freeman Dyson in 1958, when details about the outer planets’ moons were sketchy at best. I want to run this as a bit of deep space history, the working figures that would later turn into Freeman Dyson’s document “Trips to Satellites of the Outer Planets, which was declassified in 1987.
Image: Thinking about deep space destinations in 1958, as the Orion team pondered their best options for a trip that might take place as early as 1970. Credit: Freeman Dyson, courtesy of George Dyson.
With reference to the figures, George Dyson comments:
“Note that the .618 density for Enceladus was not a transcription or arithmetic error, it is due to the mass and radius of the outer planet satellites being known only approximately at that time. (I believe Thomas “Tommy” Gold was brought in as a consultant on the question of selecting landing sites.) These calculations were made to determine the best destination both in terms of an optimum velocity match and highest probability of being able to obtain water ice or hydrocarbons on the surface to replenish the vehicle’s propellant mass.”
Below is the title page of the “Trips to Satellites of the Outer Planets’ report.
Image credit: Freeman Dyson, courtesy of George Dyson.
We’ve discussed Orion many times in these pages, though it’s been long enough that it may be time for a general review in the near future. Most Centauri Dreams readers will be familiar with George Dyson’s definitive book on the project’s history, and with the overall concept of detonating nuclear devices behind the craft, with a system of pusher plates and shock absorbers to cushion the crew, and the capability of launching payloads that were mind-boggling in the days of Sputnik. Interestingly, Mars was the first destination the team had in mind, though a landing on the Moon along the way would have been part of that mission. A four or five year mission seemed a possibility, one that Freeman Dyson would liken to the voyage of Darwin’s Beagle.
But the allure of the outer planets and their satellites was hard to resist, particularly when you threw in two ways to make the mission lighter and more efficient. For one thing, it was possible to use atmospheric braking (‘aerobraking’) to reduce propellant mass. I’ll quote from George Dyson’s book on the other:
The second part of the strategy is to gather propellant for the return trip at the destination, thereby reducing the average takeoff weight of the bombs. “We assume that we can use as propellant either ice, ammonia, or hydrocarbons,” wrote Freeman, explaining why Enceladus was such a good place to stop. “We suppose that each propulsion unit contains one-third of its mass in the form of the bomb and other fabricated parts, and two-thirds of its mass in the form of propellant. This means that, when propellant refueling is possible, only one-third of the mass required for the homeward trip need be carried out from Earth.” When you put these numbers together, the end results were astonishing. “With the use of atmospheric drag a round-trip to satellites of either Jupiter or Saturn could be made with a total velocity increment of the order of 40 km/sec. With refueling and braking, all the satellites become accessible with a round-trip mass-ratio less than 2.”
The Mars ship can thus become an outer planet ship that refuels along the way. And given the document shown above, I have to close with this last quote from the book:
Forty years later, Freeman and I review a two-page handwritten General Atomic calculation sheet, “Outer Planet Satellites,” dating from 1958 or 1959. It lists, for nine different satellites, ten different parameters such as orbital velocity, escape velocity, density, and gravity that determine the suitability of the satellites as places to land. Freeman smiles as he carefully studies the numbers.
“Enceladus still looks good,” he says.
by Paul Gilster | Apr 11, 2014 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection |
The Barberton greenstone belt is considered one of the oldest pieces of continental crust on the planet. About 100 kilometers long and 60 kilometers wide, the belt is in South Africa east of Johannesburg and not far from the border of Swaziland, a region where gold was first discovered in South Africa. Greenstone belts, however, are numerous, widely distributed geographically and throughout geological history, all of them marked by the characteristic green hue imparted by the metamorphic minerals within their rocks. The Barberton greenstone belt is now yielding evidence of a massive ancient impact well over three billion years old.
The paper on this work is slated to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, where scientists will make the case that the impact they are tracking occurred 3.26 billion years ago at the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period between three and four billion years ago when numerous large asteroids are thought to have struck the planet. The impact may have caused a major shift in plate tectonics, and characterizing it will help us better understand the conditions life struggled against in its earliest evolution.
It is possible that changes to the environment caused by impacts like this one may have wiped out existing microscopic organisms, only to allow other organisms to evolve. What’s mind-boggling here is the sheer size of the event. Have a look at the graphic below, and note in particular the comparison of the impact crater to the island of Hawaii.
Image: A graphical representation of the size of the asteroid thought to have killed the dinosaurs, and the crater it created, compared to an asteroid thought to have hit the Earth 3.26 billion years ago and the size of the crater it may have generated. A new study reveals the power and scale of the event some 3.26 billion years ago which scientists think created geological features found in a South African region known as the Barberton greenstone belt. Credit: American Geophysical Union.
The asteroid, according to this American Geophysical Union news release, would have been three to five times larger than the Chicxulub impactor considered to have played a huge role in the extinction of the dinosaurs. Striking the Earth at 20 kilometers per second, the object would have created a crater nearly 500 kilometers across, a larger jolt than a 10.8 magnitude earthquake, creating tsunamis thousands of meters deep. The researchers believe the sky would have become red hot and the tops of the oceans would have boiled.
“We are trying to understand the forces that shaped our planet early in its evolution and the environments in which life evolved,” said Donald Lowe, a geologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study. As to the asteroid itself, Lowe added, “”We knew it was big, but we didn’t know how big.” The team’s model shows that while the Chicxulub event is estimated to have released a billion times more energy than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, this more ancient impact would have been far more powerful, and it was just one of many in the Late Heavy Bombardment.
The actual site of most of the impacts during the LHB is unknown, the victim of erosion, crustal movement and evolving geology, and the researchers believe the asteroid they are studying impacted thousands of kilometers away from the Barberton greenstone belt, though its seismic waves would have been responsible for the geological formations found in the region. Clearly the early Solar System was a chaotic and dangerous place, one in which the great experiment of life was under continuous threat. To map an impact that occurred more than three billion years ago is to chart the dimensions of ancient catastrophe, a time when vaporized rock fell as rain.
The paper is Sleep et al., “Physics of crustal fracturing and chert dike formation triggered by asteroid impact, ~3.26 Ga, Barberton greenstone belt, South Africa,” to be published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (abstract).
by Paul Gilster | Apr 10, 2014 | Exoplanetary Science |
Gravitational microlensing is a phenomenally interesting way to find unusual things in the cosmos. A closer star can bend space around itself enough that, when it passes between us and a more distant star, a distinct brightening of the distant star’s light is apparent, a lens effect. That’s a useful phenomenon in its own right, and gravitational lensing involving distant galaxies is a significant part of some astronomers’ toolkits. But we can also use the effect when looking for exoplanets, and in the case of recent work, even a candidate for an exoplanet’s moon.
The method works in this context because if the foreground star has a planet orbiting it, a second lensing event can occur, and a comparison between the two brightening events can help us figure out the relative mass of the two objects. The problem with microlensing is that these are one-shot events, dependent on chance celestial alignments. In other words, we can’t go back and study them a second time. That’s a shame, because some studies have found what appear to be free-floating planets, an interesting find we’d like to learn much more about.
Now we have MOA-2011-BLG-262, a microlensing observation made by the Japan-New Zealand-American Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) and the Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork (PLANET) programs, working with telescopes in New Zealand and Tasmania. The work shows two objects, one of them about 2000 times smaller than the other. We are looking at either a small star and a planet about eighteen times as massive as Earth around it, or else a planet larger than Jupiter orbited by a moon less massive than Earth.
Image: Researchers have detected the first “exomoon” candidate — a moon orbiting a planet that lies outside our solar system. Using a technique called “microlensing,” they observed what could be either a moon and a planet — or a planet and a star. This artist’s conception depicts the two possibilities, with the planet/moon pairing on the left, and star/planet on the right. If the moon scenario is true, the moon would weigh less than Earth, and the planet would be more massive than Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The exomoon option seizes the attention because exomoons have yet to be detected, and pushing the limits of detectability down to this scale is a real achievement. But why the wide range between the two possibilities? The problem is that we don’t know how far away the two objects are. If they’re closer to the Earth, they’ll produce the same effect as a more massive pair — planet around star — would at a considerably larger distance. It’s possible to use parallax techniques, taking advantage not only of ground-based telescopes but of space assets like the Spitzer space telescope, but we don’t have that data for MOA-2011-BLG-262, which will remain a mystery.
Gravitational microlensing, then, gives us a sudden illumination of a distant stellar system, after which all hopes of future observations disappear. It’s like a sudden beam of light illuminating part of the cosmos whose effects disappear all too quickly, leaving us to ask questions like this one: If this is a rogue planet, and assuming it was ejected from a young planetary system by gravitational interactions there, how did it keep its moon, and how likely are such scenarios?
Meanwhile, we continue with the other methods in our arsenal, as highlighted, for example, by David Kipping’s Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project, in hopes of answering questions about more conventional moons in actual solar systems. The paper is Bennett et al., “MOA-2011-BLG-262Lb: A Sub-Earth-Mass Moon Orbiting a Gas Giant Primary or a High Velocity Planetary System in the Galactic Bulge,” The Astrophysical Journal Vol. 785, No. 2 (2014), 155 (abstract).
